Archive for February, 2008|Monthly archive page
A Tulip (or two) For You
Just like that, a whole week’s gone. The waiting for rejections and the writing part of it is recorded here and here. I wish I could say I’ve read, but I haven’t. I’ve just noticed how beautiful it is when spring returns to the bay area. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve stopped being a reader. It’s so odd to think that might be the case, having read so much and for so long.
The Compendium of Imaginary Saints: A Review
Filed under: Books, entertainment, made up books, religion, saints |
Comments(10) 
The loveliest, funniest, most amazing book landing in my mailbox all the way from Dubai the other day. The Compendium of Imaginary Saints is the creation of Ella, who runs Box of Books, when she’s not running after her toddler and helping her newborn realize that sleep is a good thing.
It is a wonderful book — and it’s also beautifully made. The saints have these gorgeous halos, for one thing, and their eyes make you feel like they’re looking at you and wondering why you, Lily Hamrick (or you, dear reader), haven’t done anything with your life that’s led to your martyrdom and eventually elevation to being in a book by Ella.
We all loved these saints, saints who patronize endeavors like dairy farming and laundry doing, among others. I don’t know how Ella came up with this, or how on earth she can make a book that’s so beautiful to look at, when she has her hands so full, but I just want to say that I would like to buy every book in this series.
In what I think rightly shows Ella’s influence over an entire generation of compendium creators, each of my boys read her book from cover to cover (after I made them wash their hands and pray to the patron saint of cleanliness, St. RoseAnna Moses, named after the woman who cleaned our house until she declared that the tub was going to have to stay dirty unless the boys washed it themselves. Good for RoseAnna.) And then, after reading the book, William began to make up his own compendium. Heathen that he is (although his first communion is fast approaching), he seems to believe that a saint and a god are pretty much the same thing.
Here is his effort.
“St. Ida The Laundry God. As a kid, young Ida loved to do laundry with her mother. She made sure that everybody had extra laundry so that she could wash it with her mom. Ida loved laundry so much that she would sneak into other people’s houses and do their laundry for them.”
I’m looking forward very much to the next installment of Ella’s Compendiums. A total and complete High Five.
Tap, Tap, Tap
Filed under: Books, Writing, entertainment, queries, rejection |
Comments(14) That is definitely not the sound of anyone’s fingers tapping in that impatient way fingers sometimes tap, waiting around for me to post. How do I know this? Well, I read someplace that blog readers don’t like to be inundated with material. Sometimes, they can’t catch their breaths and it makes them grumpy.
And the last thing I want from you, dear reader, is grumpiness, which is why I’ve been waiting around to tell you what’s up here in BlogLily World.
This is it: That “tap, tap, tap” noise? It’s me, putting up a new page on my blog — a page designed purely for your amusement and entertainment. It is one of those slight train wrecks of a page, a page that should appeal to the voyeur in all of us. It is exactly the sort of thing that is a guilty pleasure for me, and so I figure it’s okay to make one of my own.
The page is called “Dispatches From the Query Wars” (I’ll send a really great prize to someone who can think of something more clever to call it than that!). It contains, in exhausting ive detail the results of my search for an agent to sell my novel and a literary journal to take one of the two stories I’ve recently sent into the world.
My hope is that the courage and tenacity I display in the face of adversity — not to mention the ENTIRE BOX OF CHESSMAN COOKIES I ate after I got the ding from Jonathan Lyons — will spur you on to also fling your body in front of advancing tanks, tanks in which the driver is barely looking at you as they fire off their “No thanks,” “no, never,” and that oh-so encouraging comment: “are you kidding?” Yes, if you need spurring on, I’ll send you some chessman cookies. It’s the least I can do, although I hope I’m doing it for a cause greater than the one I’ve chosen.
And I have changed the blog’s header photo too: It isn’t raining anymore! Possibly, spring is coming. Certainly, things are blooming around here.
Next Up: An actual review of an extraordinary book. In a few days. I don’t want to tire you out.
Snowy Sunday
Filed under: California, Dodge Ridge, Sierra Nevada, Travel, ski resorts, wireless internet access |
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Wireless internet access at the ski area where your cell phone doesn’t even work? Tables next to actual working outlets? Tea that’s not $5 a cup like it is at most ski areas? I have died and gone to ski mother heaven. (Or is that the mother of all ski heavens?) I don’t know. But I am truly in heaven.
Okay, there’s a huge blizzard going on, and Charlie is all set to race in it. Jack and William are out there too, on chair seven, stalking the race. Each of them is gaining character in that way that only skiing in a blizzard can confer on a child with some nordic blood in him or her.
I am a bad example, I know, but I like to think that I am working, so I am a different kind of example. Except I’m having too much fun being gleeful about the wireless internet access to be an example of really diligent hard work, which is supposed to, you know, hurt. I am thrilled about Dodge Ridge. First, good name, don’t you think? Very western, very sierra-like. It’s a little bit of a secret place (and now that news of the free wireless gets out, I’m screwed getting a table), not being up at Lake Tahoe but, instead, more near Yosemite and the gold country, named because, you guessed it, this is where they found gold in the hills in 1849, thus creating California, land of the new age, Disneyland, movies, and fog over the Golden Gate Bridge. Dodge Ridge is about forty-five minutes from Sonora, the town where my mother grew up.
My wonderful cousin has a little house in Sonora that she lets us use. It’s completely uninsulated — we like to think of it as a miner’s shack — and we love it, and we really, really love my cousin for being so generous about lending it to us. It takes about two hours on a Friday to drive up here from the bay area. Sonora’s below the snow line, so you don’t have to crawl along through the snow the way the poor people who’re going to Tahoe have to do. We get there Friday night. Sleep in the miner’s shack. In the morning, my husband, nordic god that he is, gets up, makes coffee, and performs somehow the miraculous feat of getting four sleepy, not quite so nordic people, in the car for the drive up to Dodge Ridge. It is a military campaign-like affair. Mandatory bag checks (do you have your mittens, William?), for example.
My only job is, as Jack put it a few weeks ago, to make the whole thing more comfy and more tasty. That, dear reader I can do. Instead of character-enhancing sleeping bags, they now slumber in comforters with flannel covers. I make black bean soup and bring it up. I fasten helmets so they don’t cut off the flow of blood to the head. I encourage people not to lie down in the snow (that will make you wet, darling). I feel I have a function, small though it is.
And now I have wireless internet access. I am THE luckiest woman in the world, even if nobody in the publishing world cares that they could get in touch with me today, Superbowl Sunday, up in the Sierra if they wanted to. (What, you’re not working today?) Right now, I don’t really care either.
(I would also like to say that I am aware that this post doesn’t have a single paragraph break in it. That was not my intention. But, apparently, paragraphs have been banned on wordpress. Maybe they were being misused. Overused, even. Whatever the reason, try to take a breath while you’re reading this post. And wish me luck in having my license to paragraph at will reinstated. ( *Woot. Paragraphs are back. Never mind that I didn’t actually want to download another browser and stop using the perfectly good one that came with my mac. But there you have it. If you use safari and blog on wordpress you have to be okay about paragraph-less writing, which is sort of the equivalent of talking until you’re blue in the face.)
My Email Looks Different These Days
The subtitle of this post is “How to Grow to Hate Everyone Who Sends You an Email Simply Because They Are Not One of the Nine Literary Agents and Sixty-Five Literary Journals You’ve Queried Recently.”
By way of background, and in case you’ve not heard (how that could be I don’t know, because it is my current obsession), I’ve sent off email queries to agents and a whole slew of stories to literary journals. You’d think I’d just be able to stop thinking about it now that I’ve got that stuff out there and get back to writing novel number two and maybe a short story, but nooooo. Instead, I’ve obsessed about these letters and email queries to the point that my relationship with my email inbox has changed. All day today, as I’ve waited for people to tell me that yes they’d love to represent my novel or take my story, other people — people I know and even love — have emailed me to tell me about spring soccer, or a girls’ weekend in San Francisco, or the most recent wonderful play at the Berkeley Rep. And when I’ve heard the little ping that announces an email I’ve thought to myself, YESSS. HERE IT IS. THE ONE! But it’s not the one (unless you count Subtropics Magazine who told me no thanks, but submit again, which my son wrongly took as a personal invitation to have at it on some other occasion, when it is obviously their way of preventing lunatic writers from killing themselves). Other than that, not a word — at least not from these strangers I’ve submitted my work to. And the sum total of my day is that I’ve taken no pleasure in the many lovely emails I received today from people I actually know.
The whole waiting thing is doing me in. It’s turning me into an antisocial weirdo. I’ve got to stop. Good thing I’m going to be spending the weekend at Dodge Ridge, where Charlie is racing and I am gatekeeping and there is no internet. No cell phone reception either, come to think of it. Nevermind that my friend Carrie and I have recently agreed that the definition of bleak should be: gatekeeping at ski race in blizzard. (A gatekeeper, in case you are wondering, is a person who stands on a hillside in a blizzard during a ski race and makes sure that the racers go through the gates rather than around them. You have to write things down, which means that your hands will become numb in a nanosecond.) Anyway, next time she emails me, I’m just going to be glad I have a friend like her: witty, kind, and not in any way connected to the weird thing that is sending your work into the world.
Have a wonderful weekend, okay? And email me. I need to return to the world of the normal.
